The indebtedness of contemporary thinkers to Derrida’s project of deconstruction is unquestionable, whether as a source of inspiration or the grounds of critical antagonism. This collection edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano considers how best to recall deconstruction? Rather than reduce it to an object of historical importance or memory, these essays analyze […]

Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) Andrew Benjamin   This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of ‘working with’ Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to […]

Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (SUNY Press, 2011) Tina Chanter In this groundbreaking book, Tina Chanter challenges the philosophical and psychoanalytic reception of Sophocles’ Antigone, which has largely ignored the issue of slavery. Drawing on textual and contextual evidence, including historical sources, she argues that slavery is a structuring theme of the Oedipal […]

The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (MIT Press, 2014) Eleni Ikoniadou   The sonic has come to occupy center stage in the arts and humanities. In the age of computational media, sound and its subcultures can offer more dynamic ways of accounting for bodies, movements, and events. In The Rhythmic Event, Eleni Ikoniadou […]

Great Satan’s Rage American negativity and rap/metal in the age of supercapitalism Scott Wilson   This book looks at how rap and metal, the two most pervasive popular music forms of the 1990s, have been highly engaged with America’s role in the world, supercapitalism and their own role within it. This has especially been the […]

“Simon Morgan Wortham’s Modern Thought in Pain is ambitious in scope, compellingly presented and timely. The book’s daring central premise is that pain is not merely an object for thought, but is implicated in the very act of thinking. The book forges a new way of understanding how modern ethics, psychoanalysis and aesthetics arise and […]

The Ontology of an Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Polity, 2012) Go to: http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745652603 In the usual order of things, lives run their course and eventually one becomes who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity. But as a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no […]

The future of deconstruction lies in the ability of its practitioners to mobilise the tropes and interests of Derrida’s texts into new spaces and creative readings. In Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan sets out to do just that, to continue the task of deconstructive reading both with and without Derrida. The book’s principal theme is an attention […]

Alexandre Kojève has been an often subterranean influence on twentiethcentury thought. With his profound interpretation of Hegel he became a key reference for such varied thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Leo Strauss. He returned to prominence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the surprise inspiration […]

Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, Edinburgh University Press, 2012. This is the first collection of critical essays on the work of this most original thinker. Francois Laruelle is one of the most important French philosophers of the last 20 years, and as his texts have become available in English […]